The Guilty Page 2

  The sky had begun to yellow when I passed by the Parque del Retiro. A man was holding five very long leashes attached to five Huskies. He had cuts on his face and he was wearing cheap clothes. I would have given anything to have no obligations except walking rich people’s dogs. The Huskies’ blue eyes seemed mournful, as if the dogs wished I’d take them away with me and knew I couldn’t.

  I arrived at the Hotel Palace so tired I was barely surprised that Cata wasn’t in the suite.

  The next day, all of Madrid was talking about my raunchy shamelessness. I thought about killing myself but it seemed wrong to do it in Spain. I would mount a horse for the first time and blow my brains out in the Mexican countryside.

  When I landed in Mexico City with still no word from Catalina, I discovered that the country adored me in a very strange way. Leo handed me a press folder full of praise for my foray into independent film. The words “manliness” and “virility” were repeated as often as “film in its pure state” and “total filmmaking.” My take was that Mariachi Baby Blues was about a story inside a story inside a story, where at the end everybody was very content doing what they hadn’t wanted to do at the beginning. A great achievement, according to the critics.

  My next concert—in the Auditorio Nacional, no less—was tremendous. Everyone in the audience had a penis-shaped balloon. I had become the stallion of the fatherland. They started to call me the Gallito Inglés, the Cocky Little Rooster; one of my fan clubs changed its name to Club de Gallinas, The Hen Club.

  Catalina had predicted the movie would make me a cult star. I tried finding her to remind her of that, but she was still in Spain. I got offers from everywhere to show up naked. My agent tripled his salary and invited me to see his new house, a mansion in the Pedregal neighborhood—twice as big as my own. A priest was there. He held a mass to bless the house and Leo thanked God for putting me at his side. Then he asked me to go with him to the garden. He told me the actress Vanessa Obregón wanted to meet me.

  Leo’s ambition knows no limits. It was in his own best interest for me to date the bombshell of banda music. But I could no longer be with a woman without disappointing her or having to explain the absurd situation the movie had created.

  I gave thousands of interviews but no one believed I wasn’t proud of my penis. I was declared Sexiest Latino by a magazine in Los Angeles, Sexiest Bisexual by a magazine in Amsterdam, and Most Unexpected Sexpot by a magazine in New York. But I couldn’t take my pants off without feeling diminished.

  Finally Catalina came back from Spain to humiliate me with her new life: she had become the porn star’s girlfriend. She told me this in a restaurant where I demonstrated the poor taste of ordering a tomato salad. I thought about the porn king’s diet, but I barely had time to distract myself with that irritation because Cata was asking me for a fortune in palimony. I gave it to her so that she wouldn’t talk about my penis.

  I went to see Leo at two in the morning. He took me to the room he calls his “study” just because there is an encyclopedia in there. He ran his bare feet back and forth over a puma skin rug while I talked. He was wearing a robe with dragons on it, like an actor playing a lurid spy. I told him about Cata’s extortion.

  “Think of it as an investment,” he told me.

  That calmed me down a little, but I felt drained. When I got home, I couldn’t masturbate. A plumber had made off with my copy of Lord magazine and I didn’t even miss it.

  Leo kept pulling strings. The limo that arrived to take me to the MTV Latino gala had first picked up a spectacular mulatta who was smiling in the back seat. Leo had hired her to accompany me to the ceremony and increase my sexual legend. I liked talking to her—she knew all about the guerrillas in El Salvador—but I didn’t try anything because she was looking at me with measuring-tape eyes.

  I went back to therapy. I explained that Catalina was happy because of an actual big dick and I was unhappy because of an imaginary one. Could life be that basic? The doctor said this happened to 90 percent of his patients. I quit therapy because I didn’t want to be such a cliché.

  My fame is too strong a drug. I need what I hate. I toured everywhere, threw sombreros into grandstands, got down on my knees and sang “El hijo desobediente.” I recorded an album with a hip-hop group. One afternoon, in the main square of Oaxaca, I sat down on a pigskin chair and listened to marimba music for a long while. I drank two glasses of mezcal, nobody recognized me, and I believed that I was happy. I looked at the blue sky and the white line left by a plane. I thought about Brenda and dialed her on my cell.

  “It took you long enough,” was the first thing she said. Why hadn’t I looked for her sooner? With her, I didn’t have to pretend. I asked her to come see me. “I have a life, Julián,” she said in an exasperated voice. But she pronounced my name like it was a word I had never heard before. She wasn’t going to drop anything for me. I canceled my Bajío tour.

  I spent three terrifying days in Barcelona without being able to see her. Brenda was “tied up” in a shoot. We finally saw each other, in a restaurant that seemed to be designed for Japanese denizens of the future.

  “You want to know if I know you?” she said, and I thought she was quoting a ranchera song. I laughed, just to react, and then she looked me in the eyes. She told me she knew the date of my mother’s death, the name of my ex-therapist, my desire to be in orbit. She had admired me since a time she called “immemorial.” It had all started when she saw me sweat on Telemundo. It took her an incredible amount of work to get together with me. She had convinced Chus to hire me, wrote my parts into the screenplay, introduced Cata to the porn star, planned the scene with the artificial penis to shake up my whole life. “I know who you are, and my hair is white,” she smiled. “Maybe you think I’m manipulative. I’m a producer, which is almost the same thing: I produced our meeting.”

  I looked her in the eyes, red from sleepless nights on film shoots. I acted like a stupid mariachi and said, “I’m a stupid mariachi.” “I know.” Brenda caressed my hand.

  Then she told me why she wanted me. Her story was horrible. She explained why she hated Guadalajara, mariachis, tequila, tradition, custom. I promised not to tell anyone. I can only say that she lived to escape that story, until she understood that escaping it was the only story she had. I was her return ticket.

  I thought we would sleep together that night but she still had one more production:

  “I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but you have to clear up the penis thing.”

  “The penis thing isn’t my job: you all invented it!”

  “Exactly, we invented it. A European cinematic trick. I had forgotten what a penis can do in Mexico. I don’t want to go out with a man stuck onto a penis.”

  “I’m not stuck onto a penis, mine’s sort of little,” I said.

  “How little?”

  Brenda was interested.

  “Normal little. See for yourself.”

  But she wanted me to understand her moral principles.

  “Your fans have to see it,” she answered. “Be brave enough to be normal.”

  “I’m not normal: I’m the Gallito de Jojutla, even pharmacies sell my albums!”

  “You have to do it. I’m sick of this phallocentric world.”

  “But are you going to want my penis?”

  “Your normal sort of little sort of penis?”

  Brenda dropped her hand to my crotch, but she didn’t touch me.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  She had a plan. She always has a plan. I would appear in another movie, a ferocious criticism of the celebrity world, and I would do a full frontal. My audience would have a stark, authentic version of me. When I asked who would direct the movie, I got another surprise. “Me,” answered Brenda. “The film is called Guadalajara”.

  She didn’t give me the whole screenplay, either. The scenes I appeared in were weird, but that didn’t mean anything. The kind of films I think are weird win prizes. One a
fternoon, during a break in shooting, I went into her trailer and asked, “What do you think will happen to me after Guadalajara?” “Do you really care?” she responded.

  Brenda had tried harder than anybody else to be with me. Had I embraced her in that moment I would have burst into tears. I was afraid of seeming weak when I touched her but I was more afraid that she might never want to touch me. I had learned one thing from Cata, at least: there are parts of the body that can’t be platonic.

  “Are you going to sleep with me?” I asked her.

  “We have one scene left,” she said, caressing her own hair.

  She cleared the set to film me naked. Everyone else left in a bad mood because the caterers had just arrived with the food. Brenda put me next to a table surrounded by an enticing scent of cold cuts.

  She stood in front of me for a moment. She looked at me in a way I’ll never forget, as if we were about to cross a river. She smiled, and said what we were both waiting for:

  “Should we do it?”

  She got behind the camera.

  On the buffet table, there was a plate of salad. I was a foot away from it.

  Life is chaos but it has its signals: before I took off my pants, I ate a tomato.

  HOLDING PATTERN

  I’m so discouraged by reality that to me, airplanes seem cozy. I resign myself to movies I don’t want to see and food I don’t want to taste, like I’m practicing a spiritual discipline. A samurai with headphones and a plastic knife. Suspended, cell phone off, enjoying a Nirvana where there’s nothing to decide. That’s what air travel is—a way of delaying the numbers trying to catch up with me.

  The last call I got on land was from Clara. I was in the Barcelona airport. Anguished, she asked me, “Do you think she’ll come back?” She was talking about our cat, Única. Her name means only one. “Has there been an earthquake?” I asked. Cats can sense earthquakes. Something—a vibration in the air—lets them know the earth is going to split open. Time to head outdoors.

  Male cats are the anticipatory seismologists. Female cats stay at home, especially Angoras. That’s what we’d been told. Still, Única had run away twice, no earthquakes required.

  “Maybe she’s picking up on emotional earthquakes,” Clara joked on the phone. Then she mentioned that the Rendóns had invited her up to Valle de Bravo. If my flight didn’t get in on time, she’d go on her own. She was yearning for a weekend of sailboats and sun.

  “Will you ever take a direct flight?” she asked before saying goodbye.

  I live a zigzag life. For some reason, my itineraries all lead to cities that require connections: Antwerp, Oslo, Barcelona. I work for a company that produces the best tasteless water in the world. It’s not a disparaging phrase. People don’t drink our water for the taste, they drink it because it weighs less in your mouth. The luxury of lightness. The planet is always thirsty. Everyone needs to drink. But some demand the additional delight of insubstantial water.

  I travel frequently to places that purchase expensive water, and jet lag is my constant condition. I’ve gotten used to the discrepancy in perception, the things I see when I should be sleeping. I read a lot in the long hours on flights, or I think, with my face against the plane’s oval window. I often come up with ideas that seem mystical and then evaporate like hand lotion when I land.

  Our departure from Barcelona was delayed. Now we’re flying over London, off schedule. “We’re in a holding pattern,” the pilot says. There is no room for us.

  The plane leans into a leisurely curve. We’ll circle like fruit flies until a runway opens up. The lovely autumn light makes the lawns below us shine, with the Thames sparkling like the blade of a sword and the city scattering toward inconceivable limits.

  London is an hour behind Barcelona. Those minutes that haven’t happened yet are an advantage for making a connection, but I don’t want to think about them. I’ll have to take the bus from Terminal 2 to Terminal 4, like joining the delirium of a theme park. I think about O.J. Simpson before the murder accusation, back when he shone as a desperate success known to devour yards on the football field and in ads where he was about to miss a plane. I like that about airports. They only have internal tension. Everything exterior is erased. You have to run in pursuit of a gate. That’s it. Your destination is called “Gate 6.” O.J. was made for that, to run far away from intercepted phone calls, broken love, empty glances, bloodied clothes.

  The captain’s voice has been replaced by landing music. Techno-flamenco. We circle, miles above the ground, all of us watching the clock. How many flights will be missed on this flight? If the music were different we wouldn’t worry as much. In some distant office, someone decided it was good to land to the beat of astral gypsies. And maybe it is. The discord of modernity and oranges. Music meant for arriving, not for waiting indefinitely with gates closing below.

  I’ve missed enough connections for Clara to suspect it’s part of a plan. “That much bad luck isn’t normal.” Frankfurt shut down by snow, Barajas by strike. I’ve had to sleep in hotels where you feel like you’re wasting an opportunity to kill yourself. You move from the attractive provisional order of the airport to the sordidness of transitory objects. A rented bed somewhere no one expects to see you again.

  Clara’s only partially right. My bad luck isn’t normal, but it’s also not that bad. Once I missed a plane at Heathrow under a rosy sky. The arranged hotel turned out to be nice. In the distance, jumbo jets moved along the runways like the shadows of whales, and in the lobby I ran into Nancy. She had missed her flight, too. We work in far off cities for the same company.

  We had dinner at a pub where they’d turned on a Chelsea soccer game. Neither of us likes soccer but we watched the game with strange intensity. We were living borrowed hours. Nancy has incredible blonde hair; it looks like she washes it with the water we sell. I’ve always liked her, but only then, in that time outside of time, did it seem logical to take her hand and play with her wedding ring.

  She left my room at dawn. I saw her silhouette in the cold light of the street. In the distance, a triangle of purple lights marked the juncture of the two avenues that led to the airport. The control towers looked like lighthouses gone adrift, radar sets spinning in search of signals. I breathed in Nancy’s perfume on my hand and understood, for once, the artificial beauty of the world.

  We saw each other again, at meetings and conventions, without alluding to our missed-flight encounter. When Clara suggested I was getting delayed on purpose, I remembered that singular episode and my tone of voice incriminated me, like O.J. before the jury, when he put on the black glove worn by his wife’s murderer and it fit perfectly. I wanted to run but I wasn’t in an airport.

  “Is there someone else?” Clara asked me. I said no, and it was true, but she looked at me like I was a TV snowing ashes.

  Now I’m flying over Heathrow again. What are the chances Nancy’s missing a flight, too? If we saw each other, could we be indifferent to our geometry?

  Nancy didn’t imply a repeat encounter was possible. Still, I couldn’t help noticing her ambivalence when she said, “You know where you’re taking off from, but not which sky you’re going to.” Then she laid her head on my chest.

  I page through the airline magazine. Enviable landscapes, the face of a famous architect, and what I least expected: a short story by Elías Rubio. Even though he’s publishing more frequently, finding him is always an unpleasant surprise. Elías almost married Clara. His style is striking—to anyone not married to her. I can’t read a single paragraph without feeling like he’s sending her messages.

  The techno-flamenco hurts my ears. There isn’t much time left to make my connection, and I start looking for excuses to explain to Clara that I didn’t miss the plane on purpose. I need some other problem. That’s why I read the story. Elías is a leech who feeds on reality. He’s one of the reasons I’m sick of it.

  The first time Única ran away, we hung posters on telephone poles; we left our number at the loc
al vet; we went on a radio program that specialized in runaway pets.

  Female cats don’t leave but ours had gone. One afternoon, Clara asked me again if I really didn’t care that she couldn’t get pregnant. She had been drinking some tea from India and her words smelled like cloves. I told her I didn’t, and I thought about the cat’s absurd name, the one Clara had picked as a heroic wisecrack, the one that had transformed over time into a painful irony. I looked away. When I looked back, Clara was watching something in the garden. It was getting dark. Behind a bush, there was an opaque, hazy glow. Clara squeezed my hand. Seconds later, we saw Única’s fur, soiled during her absence.

  That night, Clara caressed me as if her hands were made from a rain that leaves things dry. At least, that’s how Elías described the scene, which he had used unedited in his story. The title was loathsome: “The Included Third.” Was he referring to himself? Was he still seeing Clara? Did she tell him those kind of minutiae? The repugnant writer accurately observed a nervous gesture of hers, the way she winds her hair around her hand. Clara only releases it once she’s made some inscrutable decision.

  As I read further, my spine freezes: Elías had foreseen the cat’s second disappearance. After reconciling with her husband—a piddling talc salesman—the heroine realizes happiness is nothing but suffering held in place. The cat’s return had completed a picture. Everything was in order, but real life demanded a change, a fissure. The woman lifted a hand to her hair, wound the strands around it, and let them go. Without a word, she picked up the cat and took it to the countryside.

  Had that really happened? Had Clara gotten rid of the cat so she could blame it on my absences, or to prepare for her own absence? Elías was full of vengeful fantasies (not for nothing was he a writer!), but the story’s content wasn’t imaginary. Too much of it had actually happened. What was Única’s meaning in the story? Was Clara freeing herself when she freed the cat? When Clara had called me in Barcelona, she talked around the cat like a clue. Only now, suspended in the London air, did I realize it.